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DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

justice.gov

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Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#351

Post by ryukafalz »

vharuck wrote: post #303
BobbyJo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe needing an army of moderators is just the cost of doing business when it comes to hosting user content. I'm weary of that change being made, but really, I don't see a viable alternative, or a good argument against it. If you can't moderate content at some scale, then maybe you just shouldn't host content at that scale. I think there may be a light, or a deeper darkness, that comes out of this though. We may see…

Section 230 has been used to defend a library when a child used it's computers to access pornography. It's not all chatrooms and social media. Restricting the internet to be run by people able to manage their own websites would hurt. Ebay would have to manually review every account and listing. Good luck finding a user review website like Rotten Tomatoes. No more Straw Polls. No more GitHub.

> Restricting the internet to be run by people able to manage their own websites would hurt.

It goes deeper than that, I think. Do VM hosting companies also rely on Section 230 immunity? Do ISPs? (They’re not Title II common carriers anymore!) Would providers of this nature be required to monitor what their users do as well?

I don’t believe either of these have been tested in court, but I think there’s at least the potential here to make it much, much harder to manage a website.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#352

Post by sailfast »

gwright wrote: post #184
sailfast wrote: post #174

Having a legislative affairs office is one thing, but publishing draft legislation? That seems WAY out of line for an executive department. Why are my tax dollars being used for the executive to write laws?

Why are there so many people here surprised that executive departments participate in proposing legislation? It seems like completely normal activity to me.

It’s not normal to write draft legislation. It is normal to have a legislative affairs office that works with Congress on all sorts of things but to propose draft legislation is weird. Agencies typically try to avoid doing this as it could adversely impact their funding moving forward. Why fund an agency that already has enough money to fund a lobbying arm? It’s a norm more than a rule but it’s a thing in my experience.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#353

Post by sailfast »

velosol wrote: post #252
gwright wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens all the time. It is a completely mundane part of the daily functioning of government.

Further there are often laws that basically state "here's some general guide, executive agency X will figure out the specifics and publish that in the Fed Register as regulations."

The law instructs them to write the rules / guidance.It’s their responsibility to then do that and we fund them to do that.

Agencies don’t get funded to write the law that gives them the mandate to write the regulation. That’s a classic bureaucratic self-licking ice cream cone.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#354

Post by sailfast »

gwright wrote: post #226
mmazing wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that depends - is it a frequent occurrence, historically?

It happens all the time. It is a completely mundane part of the daily functioning of government.

In my experience this is not at all normal. Any more examples off-hand if agencies writing draft legislation? Not talking rulemaking, talking actual law. Would happily be proven wrong here but it’s something I have actively seen agencies avoid in the past, so I’m curious where you’ve seen this kind of overt draft legislation written.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#356

Post by wow_yes »

aspaceman wrote: post #242
jimbob45 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bad Samaritan carve-out You mean...Samaritan? The Samaritans were the Nazis of their day and the legend is about a Samaritan that rose above his race and did what was good - thus, the one Good Samaritan. You wouldn’t say Bad Nazi. You just say Nazi and Good Nazi.

> that rose above his race and did what was good Someone already corrected you on facts, but I just want to say that the premise of "rising above his race" is nonsense to me. Why would you think this way?

We are all burdened with the "Original Sin" of privilege from our race - whether White Privilege, Caste Privilege, etc - rising above his race is something that he could do, and we should _all do_

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#358

Post by specialist »

yunohn wrote: post #121
jakelazaroff wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's approachable, and doesn't fall into the interpretation biases of the reporter. I agree with this, but don't forget that interpretation biases will still come into play as the law is enforced — the biases of police, lawyers and judges. So it still makes sense to read others' interpretations of what this might mean in practice.

I think this is a systemic issue on hackernews. People forgetting reality exists, and always pointing at the rules and acting as if they're infallible. You'd think /hackers/ would understand that rules are for show. I've seen this regarding serious legislation like this or even something as mundane as Apple's app store "guidelines".

Riffing on Principle of Charity, Uncle Bob Martin's grumpyness, Mark Twain's many observations, and William Gibson's insight about the uneven distribution of the future:

Cone of ignorance expands further, faster than the cone of understanding.

Unlearning is even harder than learning, which contributes the durability of ignorance.

"You'd think /hackers/ would understand that rules are for show."

Ya. I'd like someone to explain cognitive certainty. The opposite of "strong opinions, loosely held". How is everyone else so sure of what they know? The only certainty I have is knowing that I'm probably wrong.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#359

Post by heavyset_go »

thekyle wrote: post #302
api wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that means only peer to peer systems without central servers are safe. There is no "server" and the data is everywhere but nowhere.

So now the police raid your house in the middle of the night because you accidentally seeded some bad content. /s I joke, of course what would actually happen is your ISP would turn off your connection.

People are raided all the time for sharing illegal content, whether the act of sharing violates IP laws or the content itself is illegal.

Re: DOJ unveils proposed Section 230 legislation

#360

Post by stale2002 »

danso wrote: post #165
stale2002 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, what other answer is there than what’s implied by that very question: it’s because “legislators haven’t made a law”. Imagine if someone ask you "Why is this Apple red?", and then you responded by saying "Well obviously, it is red, because it is red!" Would this response be considered by anyone to be anything other than a pretty extreme bad faith response? I think it is pretty obvious what the other person w…

If I had intended a "pretty extreme bad faith response", I would've done it in a sentence, not several paragraphs. To use your analogy, it'd be as if u/deadmik3 were asking, "Why must apples be called 'apples', when oranges are called 'oranges'?" It's a question that isn't coherent enough for a single answer, as it seems to be based on flawed foundational assumptions on the part of the asker, e.g. "Who says you 'must…

> lawmaking is a semantic designation

The semantics, in this case, is when someone is trying to ask "why have lawmakers not done X yet?"

And then the response to this question is "its not the law!"

The original question was quite clearly asking for a justification or reason as for why lawmakers have not done something.

And then the semantic response, that ignored the very obvious question, was to say "this is what the law is!".

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